Talk to Tori Haring-Smith about her career in education and it’s clear that her destiny was to mold young minds.
As the daughter and granddaughter of college professors, the importance of education was instilled in her at an early age and it led to years in the higher educational field where her number one priority was always to do what was best for the students.
“For me, teaching is being available to meet your students where they are and help them become the best possible person they could ever become,” Haring-Smith said.
She watched as her father, Philip Haring, was a trusted confidant for his students while at Knox College, a liberal arts school in Galesburg, Illinois. She wanted those connections with students and spent her adult life fostering those relationships.
“It was just part of the family ethos,” she said.
But as much as education has been a passion in her life, Haring-Smith also gravitated toward the arts, and more specifically theater. For those who attended her first birthday party, Haring-Smith said, they were given a script, asked to make costumes and ended the party with a performance for the parents. She directed her first play when she was in high school, taking over as the junior high drama director for a year, and her love for performance has never wavered.
“Theater and teaching are in my blood and to me they are very similar,” Haring-Smith said.
Haring-Smith has only been in Peterborough for three years, but has quickly immersed herself into the community as a retired transplant and made it her home for good. She’s on the board of trustees at the Peterborough Players, has collaborated with Firelight Theatre Workshop, where she was set to make her directorial debut in the region before COVID-19 put a halt to live performances, and is in charge of the publicity for the Monadnock Writers’ Group. She joined the 1833 advisory campaign committee to help with the final push to raise the funds necessary to complete the Peterborough Town Library project simply because of her passion for education.
“Knowledge belongs to everybody and libraries are vital to that,” she said.
But it wasn’t that many years ago that Haring-Smith didn’t really know much about Peterborough, let alone ever visited the backdrop for Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”
After spending her adolescence in Galesburg, where they would take road trips in the summer to vacation on Cape Cod and Nantucket to visit family and fuel her parents foray into the antique world, Haring-Smith ventured off to Swarthmore College, a small liberal arts school outside Philadelphia. It was there she furthered her interest in becoming an educator and also met her husband Bob Smith. After their four years at Swarthmore, and just two days before graduation, the two were married, making for one hectic weekend due to the fact that Bob’s parents were living in Tokyo at the time and were only there for the weekend.
“So everything had to be done at once,” she said.
And yes, they combined their last names.
“He says I saved him from a lifetime of being Bob Smith,” she said.
The plan was to go to grad school right away, but as life tends to do, Haring-Smith was presented with an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. She was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which provides students the opportunity to study abroad for a year completing a program of their own devising.
“You were supposed to be a complete independent learner for that year,” she said.
She was captivated by the 1959 travelogue “Report from Practically Nowhere” written by American journalist John Sack, where he visited the 13 smallest countries in the world. So that’s what Haring-Smith set out to do. She traveled to places that essentially no one has ever heard of – Lundy, Sark, Sharja, Swat and so on.
“You read that book and say ‘I want to go to these places,’” she said.
Haring-Smith said they were the kind of places that “if anybody went, they bought a stamp and left,” but she wanted to know more. The thirst for knowledge in her was the driving force.
She didn’t have a lot of money, so travel was by land when at all possible, but everything added up to make it a fabulous year and a great experience for the newlyweds.
Upon returning, she did go to grad school at the University of Illinois before heading back to the east coast for her first teaching assignment at Brown University. She started as an assistant professor in the English department before a joint appointment as an associate professor in English and Theater.
It was there that their only child, their son Whitney, was born. They stayed at Brown longer than Haring-Smith expected, but as Whitney went through elementary school, they felt he needed an experience living outside Providence.
“I thought ‘this child needs to get off a college campus,’” Haring-Smith said. “So he became an international child.”
They decided to move to Cairo, Egypt, where Haring-Smith was Chair of the Department of Performing and Visual Arts at the American University in Cairo, as well as the artistic director at the Wallace Theatre. They loved Egypt and all it entailed for their three years there, but it was time to move back to the states.
Haring-Smith never envisioned going back to Providence, but after landing the executive director position with the Watson Foundation that is exactly where they moved to. It was a two year position and she enjoyed it immensely, but it wasn’t her calling.
“I decided I really wanted to go back into higher education,” she said.
Throughout this time, she was still involved in stage performances. She had found her passion as a dramaturg, which is basically a literary adviser to authors and directors for productions, and it has taken her all over the country, to work in places like New York and Los Angeles.
“But it was getting harder to handle a theater career and a young family,” she said.
And getting back into higher education meant a move across the country to Oregon and a position of dean of the college of liberal arts at Willamette University in Salem where she was responsible for curriculum planning and assessment, faculty recruitment and development. At this point, Haring-Smith knew she wanted to one day lead an educational institution, and she spent close to four years in Oregon, also serving in the role of vice president of educational affairs. She worked closely with the university president and it gave her all the experience necessary to become the first female president at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania.
It’s the 11th oldest college in the country and was an all male school till 1970. Haring-Smith spent 12-and-a-half years as president of the college always wondering “How long do I have to be here before I’m not introduced as the first female president?” It never happened, she joked.
But being the president of a college gave Haring-Smith the power to make decisions to foster real change.
“I was in a position where I could do a lot of innovative programming,” she said.
Although, Haring-Smith knew it wasn’t going to be a position she held forever. She said she wanted to be there for 10 to 14 years, which at that point, as it is with most institutions, a different voice would be needed to usher in a new era.
And it just happened to work out that her first grandson was recently born and she knew it was time to put her educational days behind her.
“I really wanted to be a more present grandparent,” she said, something that would be impossible in the all encompassing job as a college president.
When they were at Brown, Haring-Smith and her husband bought a small cabin on Squam Lake and they also kept the house in Oregon, planning to go back and forth in retirement. But sometimes the best laid plans never come to fruition. They got rid of the house in Oregon and realized the cabin was too small for their marriage to survive in.
“We would have killed each other and I’m not sure who would have gotten to it first,” Haring-Smith joked.
So they began the search for a place to retire. They wanted to be close to Boston and the cabin and drew a circle on a map. Peterborough seemed like a good spot in between. They came up and spent a weekend at the Jack Daniels Motor Inn, and dined at places like Harlow’s, the Pearl and Waterhouse.
“We said this is a great place, let’s stay,” Haring-Smith said.
The first house they bought on Sand Hill Road they never lived in, as plans to renovate never came to fruition, instead opting to sell and then buy the home they now live in on Old Sharon Road.
Now that she’s retired, Haring-Smith says with all her volunteering jobs, she essentially works full-time for free. But she figures if it involves her passions, it’s worth it.
“I’m able to come back to the things I love,” she said.
Not only has Haring-Smith been heavily involved with stage productions behind the scenes (she’s done a little bit of acting, too), but she’s also written quite a few books on theater, as well as others in curriculum, collaborative learning and teaching. She loves to write and her first year in Peterborough, she came in second in the state in the Flash Fiction contest.
While her life has been busy, she never lost that passion for dramaturge, which she did at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence for many years. It’s why she continues to stoke that fire through her work with Firelight. She loves the freedom that directing and being a dramturg brings with it. She enjoys the challenge of creating a space to work in.
When she does have free time, Haring-Smith is working on writing the history of William & Jefferson College, as her parting gift to the school that gave her the opportunity to lead. She loves long distance swimming, wishing she could do more of it having already swum the entire perimeter of Squam Lake with Bob.
During those trips to antique shops, Haring-Smith said her one condition was there had to be animals to play with saying she “hated the whole notion of antiques.” Animals were always special to her and over the years they’ve fostered too many cats to count and currently they have 11 felines roaming their Peterborough home.
She was close to her parents as an only child, but something happened before that could have prevented Haring-Smith from even being born. Her father was stationed at Pearl Harbor on the USS California when it was struck by Japanese torpedoes and bombs on Dec. 7, 1941. He wasn’t physically injured, but the mental toll was evident.
“It took a while for him to come back from that,” she said.
But he grew into an accomplished professor that laid the groundwork for his only daughter to follow in his footsteps.
These days, Haring-Smith says she’s living in a postcard. She loves the community that she’s only been a part of for three years, but one that feels like where she was meant to be.